Thursday, December 8, 2011

Global warming forces Birds to higher altitudes and not necessarily to higher latitudes....
finds a study.......
birds aren't migrating as rapidly as scientists previously anticipated, based on recorded temperature increases.

"However, our understanding of the response of tropical birds to warming is still poor," said German Forero-Medina, a Ph.D. student at Duke's Nicholas School who is lead author of the new study. "Moving to the north doesn't help them, because tropical temperatures do not change very much with latitude. So moving up to higher elevations is the only way to go, but there are few historical data that can serve as baselines for comparison over time."
Read more:http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-climate-tropical-birds-higher-elevations.html

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Are our Glaciers melting .... faster ....???How it affects the nearby lakes and rivers flow and will it cause floods...?

A new effort, dubbed HIMLA and led by Molly Brown of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, aims to change this by harnessing state-of-the-art, satellite-based monitoring and modeling techniques.

Scientists will feed data from satellite instruments such as MODIS and ASTER into a hydrological model that will produce daily snow/water equivalence maps that will feed into other hydrological models to determine how much freshwater flows into the region’s rivers from snow and glaciers.